Lalit Bhanot, the Secretary-General of the Indian Olympic Committee, set off a firestorm of controversy last week when he sought to explain away the appalling hygienic conditions at the Commonwealth Games Village. In a careless and inappropriate remark, Bhanot suggested that Indians and foreigners have different standards of cleanliness, causing public dismay and hand wringing. However, if the truth be told, it may not have been far off the mark.
Visit any major Indian metropolis and you will find rotting garbage around every major street corner, stray dogs sniffing through the piles in search of scraps of food and pedestrians and motorists seemingly oblivious to these appalling sights. Meanwhile urban residents, regardless of social class, think nothing of tossing to the ground food wrappers, leftovers and fruit rinds in any number of public places from markets to parks. Few such areas have garbage cans handy and this only encourages this careless behavior.
Worse still, most major urban centers lack basic public bathrooms and it is hardly uncommon to see men urinating along major roads. The sanitary conditions that prevail in and around major slums in India’s cities would make the conditions of Dickensian England look positively salubrious. Even wealthy neighborhoods aren't exempt. The stench and the filth that I encounter five mornings a week as I drop my daughter off at an expensive private school make me shudder. The school, I might add, is located in a diplomatic enclave.
In the wake of the Secretary-General’s controversial remark, the local municipal authorities in conjunction with New Delhi’s government have moved swiftly to clean up the CWG Village. In all likelihood the village will be livable in time for the onset of the games. However, one is forced to wonder about what will happen when the Games come to a close. Will all of the outcry about the miserable quality of civic facilities in urban areas be swiftly forgotten? Does the quality of urban life make no difference to the millions, many of whom are increasingly middle class, in India’s major metropolitan centers? Will they undertake some form of collective action to address what are not mere eyesores but genuine signs of urban blight? Or will they simply shrug off the accumulated mounds of dirt, garbage and pools of stagnant water as simply the normal state of affairs in every urban setting?
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PT Cruz
It’s true. India is filthy – but this is a result of policy rather than culture. Historically the Chinese have just as long a track record of living in squalor as Indians – but they have a strong central government committed to delivering public services. India does not. It has a rickety federal structure committed to preserving quasi-feudal power centers.
Shyam
Indians do very well when it comes to personal hygiene, not public hygiene. It is not about last minute cleanup of the trash that makes Delhi look any smarter. There has to be vision — a comprehensive national strategy on what to do with it. By 2020, EU will be producing half its energy needs from alternative fuels (mostly from waste). Search “Waste = Food” on Google Video to learn more about innovative technologies available today for recycling. And that would also save us from headaches of landfills, biosphere damage, or killing ocean beds. Needless to say, processing waste starts with infrastructure for waste collection and the government clearly can’t do it all. Better to privatize waste management.
Praveen Kumar
The squalor and filth is all pervading in India, since Indians as a race do not respect work as it is. The people who are supposed to clean the dirty roads and dustbins are not looked upon as useful service providers, but are typecast as probably lower caste people. One stark example of how this is ingrained even in a 8 year old rich child can be seen from one of my experiences – I live in a decent posh society in sub urban Delhi. I saw a child ask a normal labourer to remove a bag of garbage away from his path of tri-cycle while riding. The fact that he himself was not keen to remove this is evident from his apparent disgust, when the labourer did not heed to his command. So he swerved past the bag, cursing the labourer. So much for Children are innocent..ofcourse behaviors like this have been accultured in him by his snobby parents.